In the News 30.01.15 : Today’s Articles of Interest from around the Internets

“It’s hard to imagine an encryption machine more sophisticated than the human brain. This three-pound blob of tissue holds an estimated 86 billion neurons, cells that rapidly fire electrical pulses in split-second response to whatever stimuli our bodies encounter in the external environment. Each neuron, in turn, has thousands of spindly branches that reach out to nodes, called synapses, which transmit those electrical messages to other cells. Somehow the brain interprets this impossibly noisy code, allowing us to effectively respond to an ever-changing world.”

“For more than a century, the standard explanation for ‘time’s arrow,’ as the astrophysicist Arthur Eddington first called it in 1927, has been that it is an emergent property of thermodynamics, as first laid out in the work of the 19th-century Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann. In this view what we perceive as the arrow of time is really just the inexorable rearrangement of highly ordered states into random, useless configurations, a product of the universal tendency for all things to settle toward equilibrium with one another.”

“Over the past half decade, big media companies like Conde Nast and Hearst have become increasingly ambitious about the look of their digital properties. Magazine brands debut a redesign every couple of years or so — sometimes more frequently — the next one splashier than the last, with larger photos, slicker production and an easier-to-use interface. (Well, at least that’s what they’re trying to do.) There are two reasons for this: One is to better appeal to the reader, who is abandoning mass-market print glossies for niche publications and independent online sites. The other is to better appeal to advertisers, who want their rich sponsored content to look good up against editorial.”

“In 1880 a Bavarian priest created a language that he hoped the whole world could use. He mixed words from French, German and English and gave his creation the name Volapük, which didn’t do it any favors. Worse, Volapük was hard to use, sprinkled with odd sounds and case endings like Latin.”

“The private military industry has surged since the end of the Cold War and is now a multibillion-dollar business. Today’s military firms are sophisticated multinational corporations with subsidiaries around the world and quarterly profit reports for investors. These companies are bought and sold on Wall Street, and their stocks are listed on the London and New York exchanges. Their boards consist of Wall Street magnates and former generals, their corporate managers are seasoned Fortune 500 executives, and their ranks filled with ex-military and law-enforcement personnel recruited from around the world. They work for governments, the private sector, and humanitarian organizations. The industry even has its own trade associations: the International Stability Operations Association (ISOA) in Washington, D.C., the British Association of Private Security Companies in London, and the Private Security Company Association of Iraq.
”